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Ask the Pro Judge, part 2
Interview with Toby Elliott
von Heiko Schmidt |
23.11.2007 |
Welcome back to PlanetMTG's „Ask the Pro Judge“. This is the second part of a series of articles. Each one will be an interview with one of the current Professional (Level 5) Judges of Magic.
Today I will have a talk with the latest addition to this elite rank of judges: Toby Elliott, who has played a major role in the recent remodeling of the Penalty Guidelines.
It will probably take a while to publish all of the interviews, but I will do my best to inform the public when there is a new one available. If you have feedback or questions you'd like to ask those judges, I'd appreciate if you send them to Judge@PlanetMTG.de. I will try to consider them for my next interviews.
The first interview of this series – with Sheldon Menery – can be found here.
Thanks for reading!
– Heiko Schmidt
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Toby, thanks for taking the time for this interview. To get started, tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from, what are you doing for a living, what's your personal life like (family, children, any other hobbies besides Magic), et cetera?
I was born in England, just outside London, and after many peregrinations find myself in Palo Alto, California with my wonderful wife Jennifer and our cat Hugin. I've been working at Yahoo for the past seven years, bouncing around from project to project as needed. There was a period where I couldn't talk about what I was doing without worrying about ninjas dropping from the sky to cart people off, but for the last two years, I've been Engineering Manager for del.icio.us, which Yahoo bought in 2005.
To be where you are now, you must be very passionate about Magic, but what other great passions do you have in your life? Are there any other games you either play or used to play? What was the last fictional book you read or movie you saw?
I've been a game player for most of my life, ever since picking up Blue Box D&D back in 1979. Though Magic has been my game of choice for many years now, I've been known to play any board or card game at any opportunity, including conventional card games. (I played Bridge through high school and Spades through college.) I'm also a baseball nut; though I'm a die-hard Red Sox fan from my years of living in Boston, I'm also fascinated by how teams are put together and the statistical analysis associated with it.
I don't play a ton of video games, though I do play some World of Warcraft, and get most of my exercise from Dance Dance Revolution. Just got off the pad, actually. I doubt we've plugged a normal joystick into the Playstation since... „We Love Katamari“ came out, I guess.
Finally, my wife and I are foodies and enjoy finding interesting restaurants. While I haven't consumed nearly the quality of wine Sheldon has (I don't drink), I'm pretty sure I've been to more high-end restaurants. If El Bulli had been open around the dates of Pro Tour Valencia, I think you'd have seen me there!
The last book I read was Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. I seem to get most of my reading done on airplanes to Pro Tours nowadays. I also rarely make it to movies, unless they're a company freebie, which is my way of admitting that the last movie I saw was "Transformers". At least the previous one was a sneak preview of "Ratatouille", a much better movie!
How did you get started in Magic as a player and what aspect of the game was and is most attractive to you? How did you get involved in judging?
Shortly after I got back from my honeymoon in 1993 a friend came back from GenCon and told me I had to check out this new game he'd seen there, so I picked up a couple of starters for my wife and me. My initial reaction was all Vorthos – the cards seemed to hold so much flavor potential. I didn't know any of the rules yet, but Lich had to be the most ridiculous card ever. It had four skulls at the top. Four skulls! Nowadays it's hard to recapture that visceral feel and the appeal of the game has become it's constant variation and wide-open design space (I design a lot of cards for fun). There's still a little Vorthos left, though.
I qualified for Pro Tour London 1999 at the first Boston PTQ of the season. Since I was no longer able to play, I figured I'd try out the judging thing. Exclusively a limited player, I began judging the constructed tournaments and continued that pattern for several years. I was lucky enough to share the California area with Don Barkauskas, who had the opposite pattern, so we switched off seasons playing and judging.
How did you move up in the judge ranks – what time did it take and how did you develop the necessary skills – and what especially was the cause for your recent and final level up?
Level 1 and 2 were quick and by the book.
Level 3 was somewhat unconventional. I went to GP Las Vegas in December 2001 to introduce myself to James Lee and expressed interest in Level 3. He graciously allowed me to interview at PT San Diego a month later – my first Pro Tour. I think his expectations were low, but I showed them enough in the interview that they decided to take a chance on me. This is something I've tried to carry through into the modern program – though we have specific things we are looking for in a Level 3 candidate, I'll sometimes advocate for a candidate with some rough edges if I think they've shown they have what it takes to improve quickly.
Level 4 is very different from a progression standpoint. For the first three levels, it's essentially a checklist; you demonstrate that you have the accomplishments and philosophical groundings you need to start out at the new level. There is no such thing as a "new" Level 4, so the criteria changes – you essentially have to perform at the level until the community of high-level judges can only say "Why haven't we promoted them yet?" While we try to give guidance and advice to identified candidates, just as we would with lower-level candidates, the advice is often more abstract and focuses on who they need to be rather than what they need to do.
The biggest issue I had to overcome between starting down the path to Level 4 at San Francisco Worlds in 2003 and my promotion in October 2005 at PT LA was a tendency to overmanage. It's a common mistake that new Head Judges of large tournaments make – you're determined to make sure everything is perfect, so you try to manage everything directly and end up managing nothing successfully. Letting go is hard, but it makes for a better tournament. My next Gran Prix was more successful and I advanced to Level 4 in October 2005 at PT LA.
Advancing to Level 5 is similar to Level 4, only harder. There were two final challenges I had to meet to make Level 5, and I was lucky enough to get opportunities to do both. The first was Pro Tour San Diego, which allowed me to demonstrate that I was capable of organizing a big event from start to finish in a fashion that the other judges, players and staff responded well to.
The second was the Penalty Guide and the Communication Guide. Not the writing of it, for which I get far more credit than I should, but in how it allowed me to demonstrate that I could clearly communicate to a wide audience of judges and players policy that I might be arguing against behind closed doors. Level 5s are the voice of the program, and I'm honored that they've asked me to help them play this role.
When talking about the new Penalty Guidelines, some people refer to them as "Toby's PG" and you usually point out that you actually didn't work them out on yourself. Who worked on this document and what was your role in its development? How long did the whole process take and how satisfied are you with the current result?
Yeah, that's far more credit than I deserve. Here's how the new Penalty Guide came into being:
We first started talking about a new Penalty Guide at ProTour Honolulu. The high-level judges there hammered out the philosophy that both players should share responsibility in keeping the game state legal, though we didn't really know what form that would take at the time.
We didn't make a ton of progress over the spring and summer, as other items came up and Andy Heckt, who is in charge, didn't have the bandwidth to give it much attention. One of the main things that blocked us was Game Play Errors. Magic is an incredibly complicated game, and we just weren't able to come up with a system that handled all the possible outcomes that an error could generate. It was leading us in circles, and when you're going around in circles, it's hard to muster the energy to really push forward.
I'd proposed a system similar to the final version – focusing on cause rather than effect – back in September, but it wasn't fully formed and people didn't pick up on it. During a meeting right before Worlds, after beating our heads against the problem for an hour or so, I brought it up again and this time the other judges present saw how to fill in the cracks to make it work. We experimented with it at Worlds and ended up with something that you would recognize as the Game Play Error section in the new Penalty Guide. Judges who kept that briefing sheet from Worlds now have a piece of Magic history!
After Worlds, Andy recognized that he didn't have the time to do the rewrite himself – his devotion to the program is amazing, but there are only so many hours in a day – and, based on my notes from a first version he floated to us, asked me to take a crack at it. The document I started with was about a third complete. Much of the intro and philosophy was in place, I could drop in the new GPE section, and other bits just needed polishing, but there were large portions that were almost blank.
The fragmented nature made it difficult for everyone to really comment on it wihout getting distracted by the missing pieces and typos, so the first thing I did was to flesh it out so that there was something written everywhere and it could be evaluated as a document, rather than a series of notes. After that, we got into a pattern. Every Friday, I would post the current version of the document to the L4/5 list and collect all the feedback. Some weeks, I might try to poke conversations in directions I felt we hadn't explored enough: "This week, everyone take a close look at Cheating and see if we have it covered", but in general, I'd just follow the conversations, try to find the consensus and write it up to start all over again the next Friday. We continued the process all the way up to PT Geneva. I remember rewording the Unsporting Conduct – Major section while waiting to board my plane.
Beta testing it at PT Geneva gave us another fifty or so judges eyeballing it and they had lots of useful feedback. The L3 list got it at about the same time, and I incorporated their suggestions as well. Some major stuff got added – before Geneva, the guide didn't have Draft Procedure Violation or Failure to Discard. A few more weekly go-rounds, and it was ready for the public.
In all, about a year of thinking about it, and three months of serious work. I wrote many of the final words, but words are easy. What matters is the philosophical guidance that was generated through vigorous debate amongst the high-level judges and Andy, and the useful and candid feedback we received from judges at all levels of the program. This is their document, and it was my privilege to type it up.
Am I satisfied? When you work this closely with a document, all the tiny flaws are magnified. I do think it's a tremendous step forward, and gives us the framework we need to start tackling the more advanced stuff like player communication, but I'll always be able to see ways in which it can be improved. Every time a question is posted to a mailing list or asked online, I try to understand where the confusion is, because it suggests something might not be as clear as it could be. Policy is an evolving process, and we're certainly not resting on our laurels now that this has been released.
Ever since the introduction of the new PG, players have been concerned about how easy it has become for cheaters to get away with stuff. This discussion has been especially lively in Germany, with popular examples being a Phyerxian Totem living even though it was supposed to have died to a Damnation or a creature ending up in the graveyard even though it was not supposed to be there, then being reanimated for the win. What do you think about these concerns? Are people overreacting because they do not fully understand the new PG yet or are lacking trust in the system? Or are these concerns justifiable and will be addressed in the future?
As with any new system, there is a tendency to overfocus on the negative possibilities. It's not a question of understanding the Penalty Guide as much as getting the hang of the idea that both players are responsible for what happens in the game, not just their half of it. Players have been abdicating this responsibility for years, as it was often to their advantage to do so.
There have always been players who cheat, there will continue to be players who cheat, and we will continue to catch them. The methods change as the system changes. To turn your example around, under the old system, a player would simply wait a few turns, take some damage from the Totem, do other things, then "discover" the error and hope that it would get labeled broken enough to get their opponent a game loss. Frankly, that's a much harder cheat to catch.
A recent update of the PG also changed how judges behave when asked certain questions. It is now made clear that any kind of giving strategic advice should be avoided. This change has lead to several confused players because they were confronted with judges telling them "sorry, I can't answer that" when they asked questions that used to be answered before. This leads to two questions:
1) How do you and the DCI view the role of judges in tournaments?
Judges are referees. They are there to help players understand the rules, arbitrate disputes and intervene when something illegal occurs. They aren't there to help the players play the game or preempt illegal actions. Think of it like a footbal referee: they'll tell you the rule for how many players should be on the field, and they'll blow the whistle when a team has more than the appropriate number when play resumes, but they won't go up to a coach and warn them that they're about to have too many men on the field.
Are you satisfied with the current policy or are there still changes to be made?
The foundation is now in place, and we will continue to build on it. There will be changes in the future, but they will not be as dramatic as what we have seen in the last few months.
2) What do you think of the way policy changes are communicated to players? I've heard people complain on several occasions that the DCI is not clear enough on changes to its policy and that often times, there's no other way to find out about changes than being confronted with them during a tournament.
Communicating to players is something we are working on. Having regular quarterly updates to the Penalty Guide (along with a list of changes) will be a big help, and we try to spread the word through articles on various websites whenever a judge is willing to write one. Much of the policy we're releasing isn't changes – it's entirely new policy designed to bring consistency to areas that have, in the past, been handled ad hoc. I'm hopeful that once we start making actual changes, we'll have people used to the processes for communicating them, just as players now understand how to learn about updates to the Comprehensive Rules.
Alright, let's get to some general questions, most of which come from the PlanetMTG readers.
Do you still play yourself? If so, at what level?
I draft twice a week every week, and have another group that meets intermittenly. I can hold my own at limited, though I'm far from the Pro level at this point. At heart, I'm a Timmy.
Assuming you had the time to play any format in a GP type event, what format would you play and what kind of deck (if constructed) or block (if sealed) do you love playing?
I've played in a GP Boston in 2001. One of my favorite formats (Invasion), but a lousy pool, alas, and a quick exit. Aside from a little Elder Dragon Highlander, I'm exclusively a limited player – I have over 1500 sanctioned matches in my limited rating, and all of 8 in my constructed one. I'm fonder of the less linear draft formats – Urza's, Invasion, Ravnica, Time Spiral.
Are you still aware of your local community? I imagine it's quite easy to forget about it when you're so active internationally.
I'm still very involved in my local community. I'd guess I do a local major event (PTQ, States, etc.) about every six weeks. I've been trying to adopt an "elder statesman" role there; I have a terrific contingent of up-and-coming judges working with me, so I want them to get as much experience in high-profile and leadership roles as possible.
Doesn't it cost a lot of time and money to become and stay a L5 judge?
I spend a lot of time thinking about Magic, the judge program and DCI policy in general. This jives well with my natural tendencies to break down things to better analyze them, so I wouldn't really call it a "cost", as I enjoy it too much to regard it as such. Actually figuring out how much time I spend on the program is impossible. Do I count the time I spend hanging out on the judge irc channel? The time I spend contemplating Outside Assistance policy while making dinner?
Similarly, with the money issue, it's a question of perspective. Wizards has been very generous with its sponsorship over the years, and when I do fly myself to events, such as this weekend in Daytona, I often add on a few days of vacation, which makes it seem less like paying to go to events (which I would do anyway) and more like tacking on an event that happens to be in the same location as a vacation.
How do you manage to spend so much time on Magic when you still have a full time job that's not related to the hobby?
I try not to let my job consume me and work reasonably sane hours. I'm fortunate to be part of a relatively stable company by Silicon Valley standards, so I'm not on the startup treadmill. Also, as I alluded to previously, a lot of work I do on the program I do while actually involved in other activities. I'll come up with an idea and just let it kick around in the back of my brain for a while as I do other stuff.
It does mean that most of my company vacation days are taken up by Magic-related activities, but as I mentioned above, I treat those as vacation opportunities and schedule around them.
Oh, and I have no kids. I suspect that's an important detail.
What does your family, especially your wife, think of your activity as a judge?
My wife has been immensely supportive all these years, and her help has been essential in getting me where I am today. She started playing Magic at the same time as I did, though her (more substantial) work commitments meant that she stopped playing early on. She'll come to tournaments sometimes if the location is interesting enough and play tourist while I'm judging.
Judge calls can arise from unusual situations – can you describe the most unusual judge call you've ever had and how you came to a solution?
Sadly, most of the unusual situations I've been in didn't involveactual solutions. When it rains inside a venue, you just make do. I do have a good story – involving Elaine Chase, an 8-year old and Nefashu – but telling it would take up most of the rest of this interview. Ask me about it at an event some time.
I've been involved in two prominent on-camera matches that posed interesting challenges. The first was Donnie Gallitz's 'retirement' match against Farid Meraghni at PT SD 2002, about an hour after making level 3. If the video for that match is out there, it's worth checking out. Donnie was determined to ham it up, and I was caught between giving him some leeway and keeping the match going. Given the circumstances, I gave him more slack than I usually would and the result was some of the best Magic theatrics I've seen.
The second was the PT Philadelphia finals that Gadiel Szleifer won. That one was a test of endurance – two and a half hours of remaining as still as possible and focussing on the match while the players played incredibly complex, convoluted Magic. The physical and mental toll a match like that takes on the poor table judge was yet another good reason to stop using them.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
It's been an honor to work with the judging community, who are some of the most dedicated and passionate people it has been my privilege to know. I couldn't have gotten where I am today without their help, support, friendship and feedback.
A belief that some new judges hold is that their ideas for improving the program are not worthy because they don't have the experience or the level. That is completely wrong. Every judge in the program – from the newest L1 on up – is capable of contributing to the philosophies, policies and procedures and should not be afraid to stand up and make a suggestion that they believe in. I look forward to hearing them.
Thanks for taking your time to talk to me. I'm sure some of our readers will give constructive feedback in the comments.
I'd also like to thank fellow judge James Elliott for conducting part of this interview with me and all the people who gave constructive criticism regarding these interviews in the past and who will hopefully continue to give it in the future.
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